I am Sophie, a Swedish woman by birth but English by adoption. I have a little mud hotel in the beautiful and ancient West African town of Djenne, Mali. WWW.HOTELDJENNEDJENNO.COM Because of unstable political
situation, tourism has ground to a halt. Hotel still open! But hotel staff mainly working in Bogolan studio now: www.malimali.org check out our fab online shop!

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Chess Psychosis

I am a very mediocre chess player
but that doesn’t stop me from spending hours every day recently playing chess
on my computer (MicrosoftChess Titans:
the reason why I refuse to update my Windows from Windows 7) There is something
here in Mali that is not conducive to reading: I read in England and in Sweden
but here I find myself watching old favourite movies and TV serieson DVDs that I bring out from Europe instead.
To counteract this passivity and to give myself some mental stimulation – and frankly
mainly because I find it exciting- I play a lot of chess.

My love affair with this game
started when I was around twelve, thirteen: my next door neighbour and class
mate Britta and I lived a brief moment in search of ‘cultural refinement’ and in our youthful view of things we saw this state as something that could be
achieved through playing chess and listening to classical music. I remember
many happy afternoons at her place playing chess and listening to the
Brandenburg concertos. Then soon after we discovered boys and other
distractions that led us astray from this pure and virtuous road towards refinement
and enlightenment.

I did not forget chess
entirelythough, and when I lived in
Islington in London in the eighties andearly nineties I ran a chess club
every Thursday for three years. Anybody could come and I never knew who would
turn up. We did have one or two grand masterswho graced our club once or twice but it was a light-hearted sort of chess club
because alcohol was served and of course alcohol + chess do not mix. But
never mind- there was plenty of laughter and there was drawing going on too and
poetry- makingby anyone who had not
found a partner yet: I still have three glorious ‘chess diaries’ from those
happy Thursdays. I also have my friend
Biggles’ (who drew the chess problem above) wonderful chess biscuit cutters
that he made for me which he presented me with when he arrived on the chess
club’s first anniversary: he had made a chocolate and shortbread chess board
with all the chess pieces which were to be eaten as they were taken! It goes perhaps
without saying that most of my friends at this time were artists...One of them ,
dear Stirling, sent me a parcel as Christmas greeting one year. When I opened
it I found three kings from three different Chess sets.

That was Islington. Then in the
nineties I moved to Notting Hill and lo and behold: noone wanted to play chess!
(An opportunity for a study by an
anthroplologist or sociologist perhaps?) So I opened my Tuesday ‘salon’ where
people played all sorts of things but not normally chess.

I am just recovering from a
rather nasty attack of malaria. It sounds more alarming than it is because
there are remedies that are tried and trusted so no one that can afford to pay
should need to be suffering for more than three of four days at the most. But
there is no doubt that the first couple of days are quite rough. Keita’s old
collegue Barry came and gave me injections and they lowered my fever and stopped
my vomiting . But I was clearly not in a state to do anything strenuous and I
needed to rest. So I started to play chess. This turned out to be a big
mistake. Chess should only be played in good health, and even then it should
not be overdone. I remember when I
started my chess club in Islington that I became ‘overheated’- that is I played
too much . That means one gets into a neurotic state when one sees everything around
one as chess pieces and one becomes a chess piece oneself. I mean that if I am
walking down a corridor and someone is walking straight towards me I feel that
I have to decide whether I am a bishop or a rook and therefore whether I should
move out of the way diagonally or crash straight into the oncoming person,
taking it. It never actually got to that point but the temptation was there and
that was annoying enough.

So I played too much chess and I
watched (once more!) too much Downton Abbey yesterday. These two
past times turned out to be an unholy marriage and the result was quite frightening in my malarial
state. When I had finally had enough and decided to go to bed I could not sleep
because I was suffering from chess overheating. The very annoying thing was
that everything had turned into chess pieces again, just like that time in Islington.
I mean that the chairs in Cousin Isabel’s drawing room had started to move like
chess pieces in my mind when I closed my eyes.When I opened them to escape this I found that the few light sources I leave on
when I sleep here alone now had also become chess pieces. There was no escaping it. I
was tired so I decided to pray for peace to go to sleep but this didn’t work
either; I found myself transported onto a big chess board in the sky where I was kneeling in front of the King with all
sorts of nasty looking enemy bishops and knights looking down on me ready to
pounce! I suppose this King eventually did answer my prayers because I did fall
asleep from utter exhaustion in the end...

6 Comments:

Always a new perspective to be found here, Sophie - I remember you were a chess addict from the way the Ladbroke Grove soirees started, but had forgotten. Must get you the Russian half-hour silent Shakhmati Goryachki (Chess Fever), about a young man who sees chess patterns and figures in everything. We'll watch it when you're next here, or it may be on YouTube (or is that difficult to access in Mali)?

Anyway, hope you're recovered from the latest malarial bout. Get a full check up because I guess that could impinge on the heart condition, and the sooner you get that op the better. xx

I hope by now you are well again, or if not, will be very soon. Your wonderful chess story, to and including a sort of chess fever(!) remind me of my one small effort, at about the same age of 12, and for the same sort of "edification program" reasons, which ended abruptly when my chess partner, Janet, frustrated that she couldn't remember from her studying up what might be the "right" next move, threw over the chess board and sent its pieces flying across the floor. She certainly couldn't have been worried about competition from me, as I was no good at all.

Dankeschoen Elisabeth feeling better now- back from Siberia?And Susan, shame to have given up on the chess! But its never too late. Will teach you when we meet one day! I guess the chess phase you describe was just before your short career as an AVON lady?